It is most commonly used for the display of values like frames per second count, status, and other diagnostic information. It is not particularly useful for proper "Heads Up Display" style overlays as the drawing is done entirely with the glutBitmapCharacter() function.

However it does provide quite a simple and easy way to push general information to the screen in private or scientific applications, or to display debugging information in games and such.

This demonstration implementation generates one line of text containing the frames-per-second cound and displays it at the bottom of the screen.

The main SDL::Tutorial::3DWorld render loop considers the console to be optional, allowing you to display and hide the console on the fly.